Cathedral of sewage
ABBEY MILLS IS A BEAUTIFUL BUILDING HIDING A DIRTY SECRET
IF you ever happen to be travelling along Green Way through east London you will be likely to notice a particularly beautiful building near Stratford, but its purpose will definitely come as a surprise.
The stunning site is Abbey Mills Pumping Station, also known as the ‘Cathedral of Sewage’.
Built in 1868, the amazing building is one of the key parts of a Victorian sewage system that saved the city from wallowing in its own filth and likely saved thousands of lives.
Although it might just seem like a pleasant pedestrianised route through London, you are actually walking over the Northern Outfall Sewer, which transports millions of tonnes of sewage away from the capital.
Both have their origins in a particularly disgusting part of the city’s history.
In the 19th Century, despite Britain’s great wealth, cities like London were completely unsuited for the huge populations who inhabited them.
The cesspits that stored the packed populations’ sewage often overflowed down to the Thames, the city’s main source of drinking water.
Diseases such as typhoid, cholera and dysentery were rife and it also meant London reeked.
It came to a head in the summer of 1858, in what became known as ‘The Great Stink’.
The smell from the stagnant river was so bad MPs actually had to flee Parliament.
Within 18 days an Act of Parliament was passed to clean up the river – and the man they turned to for this rather unglamorous job was Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Born in Enfield, he was a true Londoner and has gone down in history as one of the great Victorian engineers.
After making his bones on the railways, Bazalgette was promoted to be chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works and it was while there that he was offered the sewage job.
The system Bazalgette envisaged was split in two, north and south of the river.
The goal was to get all of London’s sewage to the east of the city, store it in vast reservoirs before releasing it into the river at high tide.
This happened in Beckton, north of the river, and Crossness to the south.
Although gravity did much of the work by taking the capital’s sewage out east, pumping was necessary in places.
That’s where Abbey Mills Pumping Station came in, pumping waste from two lower level sewers to the main Northern Outfall Sewer, which went on to Beckton.
It might seem excessive to have such an ornate building just pumping sewage, but it had a practical purpose – wealthy investors spent fortunes to have the mostly underground system built and without these extravagant buildings there would be nothing to show off.
Today, 150 years later, the pumping station is still in use.
Although only used as back-up, the Victorian pump house at Abbey Mills does still operate at times of particular strain.
Security is high at the facility – it’s surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence, and for good reason.
A well-placed bomb would take out the whole of north London’s sewage system, something the IRA did attempt in the past.
The sewage system is still seeing upgrades. In 2016 the Lee Tunnel opened, meaning 16 million tons of sewage was no longer being pumped into the Lee River.
As one of the employees at the pumping house said: “The river’s slowly clearing up.
“Now you can see the shopping trolleys and bikes.”
At some stage the facility at Abbey Mills will likely turn into a museum like its sister station in Crossness.
But for now it plods on.